Content tagged with “young-adult” under “My Library”

“One of my daughter’s friends left this in my car after she borrowed it to drive to a Pitbull concert in Omaha. So I read it. Five students get mysteriously pranked into serving detention together. One of them dies from an allergic reaction. Who did it? The format of the book is interesting. Each…”

“This is the first novel in the Young Bond series. It covers James Bond in 1933 when he’s a 13-year-old boy at Eton. The date setting of the novel is actually never mentioned. I was trying to reverse-engineer it based on comments by the characters. Mentions of ‘the war’ had me thinking they were…”

“My neighbor bought me this for my 50th birthday as a joke. Just to spite him, I read it. It’s about what you would expect. It was written in 1962 and it shows. Lots of ‘fellows’ and ‘chums’ and ‘nifty.’ Also, lots of exclamation points and adverbs. No one just ‘runs,’ they always ‘run quickly!’…”

“I read this on a friend’s recommendation. I’m trying to read more fiction. I enjoyed it. It’s a young adult novel, so you get the familiar tropes: adolescent facing a major choice, problems with authority, dark forces swirling in the background, a hopeless romance, etc. But it’s put together well,…”

“I read this as the second novel in the series. It’s better than the first one (‘The Magician’s Nephew’), but still pretty thin. There are no layers to the story of the plot – it’s very linear, very superficial. There are no twists. It seems like a heavy allegory of the Christ story, but apparently…”

“Honestly, I didn’t love it, which I know is heretical, but it was very episodic – just random episodes kind of strung together with very little unifying plot. This is likely due to the fact that it’s a kid’s book, but, still, I just couldn’t get into it. Also, I wasn’t in love with his writing…”

“If you were a geek in the 80s, your book has arrived. The author is one year younger than me, and I half-suspect he was simply trying to cram as many 80s geek references into a single book as he could. The result is insanely fun. Everything is there: Wargames, Dragon Magazine, text adventures on…”

“This is my sixth Potter novel – I’ve read them all in order. Like the last one (‘The Order of the Phoenix’), this was long: somewhere close to 700 pages. And like that one, the book seemed to meander a lot. I said of the last one that Rowling could have cut 200 pages from the middle and no one…”

“A good installment in the series, but overly long. At 900 pages, it was the longest so far. She could have cut a third of the book out and told the same story. There were hundreds of pages in the middle where not much of anything was happening. I enjoyed the characterization of Umbridge. Also, I…”

“My daughter read this for school and asked me to read it too. It’s essentially the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ for tweens. I enjoyed it. It was well-written and had a nice theme of redemption and the need to be good to other people. Much like the movie, the protagonists can’t continue their lives until…”